Sweeter Than Honey

Martha Clarke’s movement-theatre pieces have sometimes been heavy on eroticism, with good-looking people sitting around naked on the stage. And, as is often the case with sexy shows, they have tended toward the deluxe: panties, poetry. Now, in collaboration with the playwright Alfred Uhry, Clarke has made another show about sex, “Angel Reapers”—it débuted at the Joyce this week and runs through December 11th—but this one is abstemious.

Indeed it is about the Shakers, the severely ascetic Protestant cult established by the Englishwoman Ann Lee in New York in the mid-eighteenth century. The Shakers were devoted to visionary experience, a goal toward which they advanced, in part, by the requirement of complete chastity. So it was, too, in Catholic convents and monasteries, but the Shaker community included both men and women. In the show we see six women and five men in one room, its closeness reinforcing the psychological pressure. There is no set except a line-up of plain, slat-back chairs—the famous “Shaker chairs” that this community built to support themselves. The men are dressed all in black, with black hats that, much of the time, prevent us from seeing their faces. The women are in long cotton gowns in dark shades of pink and blue and green, the only spots of color in the show. (I’ll bet there was an argument over this.) They wear little brown boots, the better to stamp out evil. White cotton caps cover their heads, lest their hair, by its luxury, attract attention. Light streams in from the side—dawn, darkness, the soul states of the characters. These young people stare at each other across the room.

There is no instrumental music in “Angel Reapers”—only hymns, including some famous ones, such as “Simple Gifts,” the beautiful song that Aaron Copland wove into his score for “Appalachian Spring.” (There is also “Sweeter Than Honey in the Comb,” to drive these anchorites mad.) Then there is the percussion, the stamping—sophisticated, syncopated, textured—that the cast produces in its dancing. While the hymns pour out tenderness, the stamping speaks of frenzy. Sewn into it are brief virtuoso passages. Man A grasps Man B around the waist and lifts him into the air, where Man B, entranced, walks in place as the other turns him. Woman A, with her sharp, mean little boots, clamps the body of Woman B, who is lying down, and whirls her around violently on the floorboards. (I had never seen this movement before.) You’re afraid that Woman A will grind her heels into her captive’s belly. These episodes break out in the dance like brushfires—sudden, brief, terrifying. We don’t know what they mean. Where is Man A walking to, in the air? What is the reason for Woman B’s punishment?

The characters come forward and give little monologues about their lives, as in “A Chorus Line,” but the speeches, many of them composed by Uhry on the basis of actual Shaker documents, are much less worldly. The characters don’t say, “I wish I could spend a night with that girl,” or “Oh, that boy is looking at me.” Instead, most of them tell us of their visions. One recalls for us how she walked into her room one night and saw a whole flock of sheep, with pretty white wool, on her bed. Another remembers how she was a good wife to her husband and then, one day, opened the door of the broom closet and found God standing there. He told her that her husband was unworthy of her, so she left her home and joined the Shakers. My favorite speech, though, is ordinary and concrete. A man says that when he was younger he had a farm and a wife. Neither of them was fertile, so he abandoned them for the Shakers. “Still I love them,” he says, and when he gets to heaven he will pray God to give them back to him.

This sex-condemning show has some vivid sex. A man and a woman kiss, whereupon all the other women go into action, whirling around in the space, hissing like snakes. We know what snake they’re trying to expel. The remedy doesn’t work. The man and woman fall to the floor together. The experience is ravishing to us as well to them. She rips open her bodice. Her breasts gleam in the white light. Strange to say, the couple’s action seems almost to touch the hearts of the community. The other Shakers encircle them and do a quiet stamping dance. Chasing evil before, now they no longer seem to recognize love as evil. Possibly the most striking thing about this show is that it refuses to limit itself to either realism or vision, but goes back and forth between them.

In the end, though, realism reasserts itself, and breaks our hearts. The erring couple leaves the Shakers. But later, the woman, pregnant, returns and begs Ann Lee to let her back in. She sings a sweet old song: “I sometimes think, oh that I was a little dove! How soon I would fly there and light down upon the very spot. And then I would go to the doors or windows and peck, peck until you would let me in. Oh my mother! I feel so very far from home.” Ann Lee turns her face away. The light dims. Then there is darkness, and the show is over.

How interesting it is—and I have no explanation—that after close to a half century in which evangelical Protestantism has been a huge cultural force in our society and in our politics, artists are now, at last, taking an interest in it. It was the subject of the movies “The Tree of Life” and “Higher Ground,”—and the musical “The Book of Mormon,” however funny, still takes evangelism as its main topic, and makes serious points about it. All those shows opened this year. Now we have “Angel Reapers,” tighter, wilder, and more direct.

Photograph by Sara Davis.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.